


A Thousand Words

by CassandraTheRed



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar
Genre: Gen, Rats Make Good Characters, Sixth City Contemplation, The Fallen Cities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-19
Updated: 2016-11-18
Packaged: 2018-08-31 20:10:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8591875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CassandraTheRed/pseuds/CassandraTheRed
Summary: An empress' treason. A rat's musings. A waiting hunger. Flash fics from Fallen London.





	1. Betrayal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So many lives at stake--but she's willing to sacrifice them all.

Victoria rules an empire that straddles half the globe, but in the face of her husband's death-rattles she does not feel like an empress; she feels like a frightened girl reduced to sobbing and wringing her hands. But there is an audience to be kept and so she does neither; she washes her face and changes her gown and goes to her private drawing room. 

Her visitor is no man, despite his handsome face and expensively tailored suit; surely no man has glowing red eyes, or such pointed teeth in his smile. He takes the chair held out for him and says, "I have the contract, if the price is fair."

Victoria draws in her breath. She should not turn her back on this-- _devil_ , she thinks, for that is what he looks like--but she goes to the window and looks out. London: black, grimy, glittering, teeming, tide of humanity threatening to slide into the Thames, jewel in the crown of the world.

Hers to rule; hers to bargain away. 

"You can save him?" She can hear Albert's breathing still, and pretends her voice does not quiver.

"He will live," the devil says simply, "if that is what you call salvation." 

A trade, if she agrees. A million lives, a million souls, for one.

_My people will call me traitor_ , she thinks, and stares at her reflection in the glass, and decides it is a name she can bear.

"Yes," she says. "Yes. I find the price is fair."


	2. Before

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sable is the name of my character’s pet rat, but spinning him off into his own character is proving promising...

Sable is finding he cannot remember _before_.

London had been on the Surface once: he knows that, he had been alive then, even though a rat's life is shorter than a man's. The city had worked beneath true sunlight, slept beneath true stars. Sable had been a lad then, as rats reckon such things, but old enough to remember; and yet he finds, when he makes an effort to do so, that the memories are unstable as water, slipping through the grasp of his mind like sand, as fuzzily indistinct as the dreams brought on by a drop of prisoner's honey.

He stops trying, after a while.

It's easier, really, to live in the new reality, to let the memories be those of close quiet marshy darkness, of the ever-present dusty yeast smell of fungus, of the sweetness of a drop of honey and the tang of a thimbleful of beer. Certainly easier to forget that humans once considered him vermin, that cats were once hunters of rats rather than keepers of secrets.

So valuable, secrets.

And, oh, the secrets these humans have, that they murmur to themselves when they think they are alone, that they gasp and giggle over when they're not, never realizing that smaller ears are listening and smaller hands are writing.

Sable has taken up under the floorboards of a garret in Spite, and started writing down the more interesting bits. He'll have enough for a book soon, he thinks.

A book that is not about _before_.


	3. Throwaway

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> London is a good place to be a rat.

London is, Sable reflects, a good place to be a rat.

He's let himself be the pet of a devil, of a squid-faced Rubbery Man, of a human or two. Being a pet means regular meals, at least for a while, regular baths, a place to sleep that's decently warm and dry. One of the humans had even got him a little rostygold collar with his name on it, though she'd been a bit dim and had named him Petunia.

He'd run away, after that, and pawned the collar. A rat has his dignity.

Still, not bad experiences. Decent sorts, all of them, in their way: the devils decadent, always smiling, never meaning it. The Rubbery Men quiet, clannish, trading in bits of strange sticky amber and tiny, salty fish with satisfyingly crunchy bones. But the humans are, by far, the best of the lot.

They're always _dropping_ things.

Bits of cake and cheese. Glasses of wine or beer or even absinthe (and a rat has no compunctions about licking the drops from the floor). Scraps of silk and damask; rings of rostygold and slivers of nevercold brass; stamps and pencil-stubs; earrings, hair clips, _teeth_. If it's been through a human's hands, there's a pretty good bet it's hit the floor at least once in the process. Some of the rats in the city are even talking about setting up shop in the Bazaar, to sell the daffy humans' things back to them.

A very good place to be a rat, indeed.


	4. Hunger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There have been five Fallen cities. There will be more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Fallen City identities here are taken from thefifthcity.wikia.com.

The Bazaar waits.

Four cities the Bazaar has stolen from the face of the earth already: Uruk, in whose building savages became citizens; Amarna, horizon of a new sun, keenly intelligent; Hopelchen, savage, humid, limned in blood; and Karakorum, fierce glittering silver sapling of the East.

For London the Masters of the Bazaar had bargained, a negotiation made in the promise of death and the desperation of a woman's grief. London could have been spared, as Rome had been spared before it, if Victoria had been wise; but she had been blind and now she is the Traitor Empress, secluded in her palace, her name a blasphemy never spoken aloud.

And the next--

Yes. There will be a Sixth City, though not for a while yet; not until the Bazaar has finished with London, has ground it down to bones and scraps and whatever little curiosities will be the future relics of its antiquity. But then--

So many to choose from, the Masters will be long in deciding. Paris, gay and vibrant. Istanbul, rich and golden. New York, the steel-crowned rising star of the New World. Beijing, Bombay, Calcutta: none of them young, each of them thronged, a glut of humanity in a single swallow, a fruit packed to bursting with seeds.

Any of these, or none. Any of these, or some other, some place yet unfounded and unnamed. The only certainty is a Sixth City, a Seventh, an Eighth, a Hundredth, because the Masters are patient.

And the Bazaar is ever hungry.


End file.
